Examining fear of success among medallist athletes in relation to gender differences

Abstract

Success is of utmost importance to every athlete either of male or female in competitive sports. But in Indian male dominating society, where males are motivated to achieve success, females are not at par motivated and mostly feel discouraged. The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of fear of success among athletes to know its prevalence in gender differences among Indian sports society and which gender was affected the most with the emotion of fear of success. For the study, a total of 162 college medallist athletes (N=81 male and N=81 female) were selected with purposive sampling technique. The Fear of success was measured by fear of success scale (FOSS) by Zuckerman and Allison's (1976). Results showed that females were greatly affected by fear of success than their male counter parts and was found to be significant at 0.01 level.